I've studied the film industry, both academically and informally, for 25 years and extensively written about it for the last five years. My outlets for film criticism, box office commentary, and film-skewing scholarship have included The Huffington Post, Salon, and Film Threat. Follow me at @ScottMendelson.

The author is a Forbes contributor. The opinions expressed are those of the writer.

Box Office: 'Godzilla' Scores Monstrous $196M Worldwide Debut

Godzillascored a whopping $93.2 million on its opening weekend, far outpacing tracking guestimates that presumed around $70m. That includes $9.3m in Thursday showings (9.9% of its weekend take) and a $38.5m opening day, giving the film a somewhat bleh 2.42x weekend multiplier Still, as a box office pundit, there are few things more enjoyable than a happy box office surprise, when a film vastly over-performs its tracking and expectations. Such is the case with Godzilla. The Gareth Edwards monster revamp has the second-biggest opening weekend of the year, behind the $95m opening weekend of Captain America: The Winter Soldier. It is ahead of the $91m debut for The Amazing Spider-Man 2 and currently the 6th-biggest debut weekend for a non-sequel. Oh, and it earned another $103m overseas, for a massive $196m worldwide cume. It is beyond cliche to refer to a Godzilla film as a “box office monster”, but if the shoe fits…

Warner Bros. (a division of Time Warner) is surely thrilled with this debut, as it’s right in the wheelhouse of The Amazing Spider-Man 2 ($91m) and Captain America: The Winter Soldier ($95m). It’s their biggest May debut ever, supplanting the $91m Fri-Sun debut of The Matrix Reloaded and their eighth-biggest debut overall. And unlike Amazing Spider-Man 2, Godzilla didn’t cost $250m to produce. At $160 million, the film is set to earn back its budget domestically by the end of nextnext weekend has already topped its budget worldwide by about $30m. To paraphrase the tagline from the last Godzilla film, “budget does matter.” This is Legendary Picture’s last production with Warner Bros. (Legendary put up about 75% of the budget), and they will clearly be missed. The earned $14.1m, or a whopping 15.1%, in IMAX alone (which is how it should be seen anyway). It earned 9% from 347 PLF theaters. It in total earned 51% of its grosses via 3D ticket sales. It played 58% male and 60% over-25 years old.

But the opening figure itself is a marketing triumph by the Dream Factory, as this is the second successful new franchise that Warner Bros. has launched just this year after the $460 million-grossing The LEGO Movie. When I talk about how Warner Bros. doesn’t “need” a multi-film DC Cinematic Universe, this is what I mean. The film screened early enough to build strong critical buzz and the review embargo dropped early enough to let audiences know that they’d presumably like what they saw. The teasers and trailers promised a grand-scale and dead-serious monster film, with an emphasis on human characters (Bryan Cranston’s crazed scientist and Ken Watanabe’s tormented scientist specifically) and just enough creature footage and destructo-carnage to wet appetites without giving away the store.

My issues with character work aside, there are plenty of moments that will make audiences gasp and 85% of those moments were not in the marketing campaign. Gareth Edwards delivered the monster-mash goods and Warner Bros.’ marketing did the rest. This was a film that pretty much everyone I knew, film nerds and “regular folk”, wanted to see or were at least curious about. I can’t exactly pretend that a big-budget remake of Godzilla scoring huge is “good for the industry” in any serious fashion, but again I’m always happy to see a well-marketed movie over-perform the pre-release expectations. It keeps this game fun and I’d much rather write about surprise hits than surprise flops.

As for longterm prospects, it’s a bit more general audiences-friendly then X-Men: We Hope You’ve Watched Every Prior X-Men Picture Within the Last Week which should help make it the consensus second choice over the next few weeks as the live-action blockbuster season takes a comparative rest between Memorial Day and Transformers: Age of Extinction. In terms of the last 15 years of pre-Memorial Day debuts (seven of which had either a Star Wars prequel or a Shrek film), the films that didn’t exactly thrill audiences (Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, Prince Caspian, Shrek the Third, Battleship) had a multiplier of around 2.7x. The ones that caught on or played well (Star Trek Into Darkness,Attack of the Clones, Revenge of the Sith, Shrek: The Final Chapter) had multipliers well-over 3x.

For the record, I’m leaving out the insane 6.4x multipliers of The Phantom Menace and Shrek, because the industry just doesn’t work like that anymore.And the allegedly frontloaded Matrix Reloaded ($281m off a $91m Fri-Sun debut and $134m Fri-Mon debut) would be considered almost leggy eleven years later. Anyway, the weekend multiplier causes a little concern, but we’re probably looking at a domestic total of between $245m and $280m, with the possibility that audiences don’t like it as much as critics, in which case give it a 2.4x and a $225m total. Obviously all of these possibilities qualify as “good news”, so this is just a matter of fun-with-math until we see how it plays after Memorial Day weekend. We’ll surely see a sequel to this one in a few years. Spoiler Alert for Godzilla 2: Rise of the Dark Gamera: Gamera (played by Chewitel Ejiofor) totally planned to get caught the whole time.

The only other new release was Walt Disney’sMillion Dollar Arm, which stars Jon Hamm as a sports manager who recruits kids from India to play American baseball. Disney attempted the old-school counter-programming route, but the reviews weren’t there and there are enough films of all stripes and sizes to get most moviegoers going elsewhere. The$25 million-budgeted film earned $10.7 million for the weekend. Walt DisneyWalt Disney is mostly getting out of the non-franchise game, and this film’s sad debut implies they may be right. Still, kudos to the Mouse House for offering at least the occasional non-franchise centric flick amid the Marvel movies and animated blockbusters. Next up on that scale is The Hundred-Foot Journey in August. There is much to be discussed about how Jon Hamm couldn’t translate his starring role on a cult television show (Mad Men is one of the best television shows ever aired, but it’s not a ratings blockbuster) into mainstream movie stardom, but that’s for another day.

Universal’s (a division of ComcastComcast) Neighbors earned $26 million on its second weekend. The crowd-pleasing Seth Rogen/Rose Byrne/Zac Efron comedy dropped a somewhat large-for-a-comedy 47%, (thanks Godzilla!) and now has a terrific $91.5m domestic cume. Worldwide, the $18m comedy has earned $146.3m. The Amazing Spider-Man 2 earned another $16.8m, dropping another 53% in weekend three. Sony‘s pricey sequel has now earned $172m in 17 days, or $9m less than what the other Spider-Man 2 earned in six days ten years ago. The good news is that it’s earned $633m worldwide thus far. Jon Favreau‘s Chef expanded to 72 screens and earned $734k. The Open Road Films release has $1.02m and will further expand over the holiday weekend.

The Other Woman earned $6.5m in its fourth weekend for a solid $71.9m domestic cume. Mom’s Night Out earned $1.9 million (-56%) in weekend two, bring Sony’s faith-based family comedy to $7m. In better faith-based film news, Paramount’s Noah crossed $100m domestic on Wednesday while Sony’s Heaven Is For Real crossed the $80m domestic milestone with a $4.44m fifth weekend (-41%) and now has $82.249m. Captain America: The Winter Soldier has now crossed $250m domestic and $700m worldwide, while Rio 2 now has around $118m.

That’s a wrap for this weekend. Join us over the Memorial Day holiday as Warner Bros. launches the Adam Sandler/Drew Barrymore romantic comedy Blended while 20th Century Fox releases X-Men: Days of Future Past. In the meantime, enjoy this top-ten list courtesy of Rentrak.

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I do agree with you that as a company as a whole WB definitely doesn’t me multiple DC cinematic films to survive, WB is obviously one of the most successful and premiere studios ever without saying. That being said, that’s exactly why I think WB needs to allow DC their own cinematic division like Marvel has. While it doesn’t hurt WB in the least having a lack of DC cinematic films, it’s hurts DC as a company to not be able to produce more films. As far as “Godzilla” getting to 280 million domestic, you’re reaching way to high there Scott. No way is it reaching anywhere near 280 million with DOFP and “Maleficent” on the horizon, I don’t think so. Depending on “Godzilla’s” legs i’ll say it ends up between 210-235 million domestic.

Hey Scott…shouldn’t someone at Forbes be interviewing John “hands down” Furrier at this time to ask him what exactly he missed in his original assessment of the new Godzilla’s prospects for success? That would make for some interesting reading.